Interesting thread on drives here. I use ATA 100 drives and find that the
difference in performance is negligible for flight sim work. I would,
however, highly recommend getting 7200 RPM drives with 8 meg caches in the
80-120 range. The larger the drive, the more platters and the quicker the
access. Drives inevitably fail and these are less expensive to replace than
some of the higher priced SATA versions when they do. Seldom do I have need
for loading a LOT of data very quickly. The feeds for scenery updates while
flying in FS9 are relatively small and the differences in access times is
unnoticable, IMHO, especially with a 7200 RPM multi-platter drive.

Most motherboards now have SATA (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.) if you're going
to the Intel 800 FSB DDR setups so it's a matter of what you want to hook
up.

--
Mike Davis